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Howard’s End on the Landing : A Year of Reading from Home

The author and publisher, Susan Hill, after a fruitless search for a book, realized she had accumulated a lifetime’s supply of books that she had never read and books that she wanted to reread. Thus began a year-long project of rereading old favourites. The goal: “The Final Forty”, a list of forty books that could satisfy her for the rest of her life. On the way, Hill meanders through topics as varied as things left in books, books as physical objects, writing in books, the value of slow reading, pop-up books, and underappreciated writers. She shares her love of authors as diverse as Anthony Trollope, Barbara Pym, P. G. Wodehouse, Enid Blyton and Elizabeth Bowen, as well as memories of friendships with Benjamin Brittain, Penelope Fitzgerald and Bruce Chatwin. While not everyone will share her distaste for Jane Austen and Alice Munro, she may tempt you to search out copies of Vanessa Bell’s Sketches in Pen and Ink, diaries of Frances Partridge and James Lees-Milne, or Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill .